Friday, January 1, 2016

Poe 1960, Pt. 6

Editora Continental / Outubro / Taika were 3 names used by the same small publisher in Brazil. The work of artists Jayme Cortez & Miguel Penteado, they produced some wonderful comics, many
of them in the horror genre, each doing many gorgeous, stunning cover
paintings!

I have discovered, between my own researches and the IMMENSE help of artist and fellow fan Toni Rodrigues, that Continental / Outubro / Taika during their run produced at least 25 POE adaptations-- MORE than Skywald or Warren !! It's my intention to compile, clean up, TRANSLATE and COLOR every one of these for my POE blog project!!

2nd in line, another version of that popular favorite...

"THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH".

This is the 3rd comics version of this story, following...Marvel's ADVENTURES INTO WEIRD WORLDS #4 (Spring'52), and Charlton's THE THING #2 (Apr'52),
...the latter some 8 years earlier. There would be MANY more to come!

I ran across this during my search, listed on the cover of SPEKTRO #6
(Editora Vecchi / Jul'78). Many issues of that series have been
posted online in their entirety, but not this one. Via a
blog (found during another online search),
I discovered the artist was Manoel Ferreira. I don't know much about him, as he has proven strangely difficult to
find any information on. From the GDQ site,
I learned he was very active between 1950-1960, and was a "civil servant" who did comics on the side! Anyway, as I suspected (following my
investigations into Luiz Saidenberg's "O Gato Preto"), the SPEKTRO appearance was a reprint! The story had actually debuted in the early 1960s, in an issue of CLASSICOS DE TERROR.

I didn't know which one until Toni Rodrigues e-mailed me HI-RES scans! I had already processed, translated & colored the 2 pages from SPEKTRO #6 I found on that blog, but now I have the whole thing. I also discovered that SPEKTRO
was apparently in the habit of re-formatting the panels to fit smaller
pages, and ONE of the panels I colored was NOT actually from the
original comic! I'll be including those as a bonus.

The original POE story is a mere 3 pages, so most of the comics adaptations tend to be on the short side as well. At 5 pages, this ties with at least 2 others (so far) among the shortest.

I really like Ferreira's style here. It reminds me a lot of Tom Sutton's work... who also did this story, but around 6 YEARS later! As it happens, the Sutton version was the 1st story in this project I was inspired to add COLOR to.
For this version, I decided to use the exact SAME color scheme!

Now this is maddening. Jayme Cortez'
stunning cover is reprinted here with the colors totally distorted.
But that's not the worst of it. Although this book contains 100 pages and 14 reprinted stories, NONE of them are by Poe, despite what it says right there on the cover. This really shows how chaotic Taika had become by this point.

Page
12 / The level of visual detail lost in the reprint is almost
shocking, though nothing I haven't seen before with this sort of thing.
In addition, oddly enough, the text has been altered extensively, and I
see a figure has been added to the 1st panel, presumably by someone other than Ferreira.

Page 13 (Note the last figure on the right in panel 5-- and the entire panel 6-- were ADDED for the reprint!)

Back cover by ROBERTO SIMOES

As a bonus, here's another piece of Manoel Ferreira art I found online...

Scans of CLASSICOS DE TERROR #9 supplied by Toni Rodrigues with special thanks!Scan of ALBUM CLASSICOS DE TERROR #11 (1974) from the Mania De Colecionar site.Scan of ALMANAQUE CLASSICOS DE TERROR 5-A (1976) from the Mercado Livre site. Scan of SPEKTRO #6 cover from the Nostalgia Do Terror site.Scans of SPEKTRO #6 interiors from the Enquantoisso-Patati blog.Scan of SPEKTRO #6 back cover from the Canibuk site.
Scan of misc. Manoel Ferriera art from the Casa De Gravura site.Scan of Manoel Ferreira self-portrait from the Guia Dos Quadrinhos site.